Does Jesus have one will or two?
The question sounds abstract. But Maximus the Confessor thought the answer was important enough to lose his tongue and his right hand for it.
The Hypostatic Union teaches that Christ is one Person with two natures — divine and human. The Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) defined this clearly.
But Chalcedon left a question open: does will belong to nature or to person?
In the seventh century, this question became urgent — and the answer split the Church.
The doctrine of Monothelitism taught that Christ has only one will — a single divine-human will.
This was politically attractive. The Byzantine Empire needed unity between Chalcedonian Christians and Monophysites (who rejected the two-nature formula). A "one will" compromise seemed to offer a middle ground that both sides could accept. Several emperors and at least one pope (Honorius I) appeared to endorse some version of it.
But the compromise was theologically unstable. If Christ has no genuine human will, then his human nature is incomplete. And an incomplete human nature cannot save a complete human being.
Maximus saw what was at stake with absolute clarity. His argument rested on a principle established centuries earlier by Gregory of Nazianzen: "What has not been assumed has not been healed."
If Christ did not possess a genuine human will, then the human will — the faculty by which we choose, desire, and consent — remains outside the scope of redemption. Sin entered the world through an act of human willing (Adam's disobedience). Salvation must therefore include the healing of human willing — and this requires that Christ possess a real, functioning human will.
Maximus taught that Christ has two wills — divine and human — and that they operate in perfect harmony within one Person. The human will freely and lovingly conforms to the divine will, not by being overridden or abolished, but by being healed and restored to its proper orientation.
This is not a conflict between two competing desires. It is a portrait of what human willing looks like when it functions as God intended: freely aligned with the good, without compulsion, without distortion.
The clearest biblical witness to Christ's two wills is the prayer in Gethsemane:
"Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done." — Luke 22:42
Monothelitism cannot account for this prayer. If Christ has only one will, who is speaking to whom? The prayer only makes sense if there are two wills genuinely present: a human will that naturally recoils from suffering, and a divine will that embraces the Father's purpose — and the human will freely surrenders to the divine, not from compulsion but from love.
This is the model for all human prayer: "Not my will, but yours be done."
Maximus was arrested for his refusal to accept Monothelitism. When he would not recant, his tongue was cut out and his right hand was severed — the instruments of his speech and his writing. He was exiled to the Caucasus, where he died in 662.
The Third Council of Constantinople (681 AD) vindicated his theology, affirming two wills and two natural operations in Christ. Maximus was later recognized as a saint and one of the greatest theologians of the Eastern tradition.
The doctrine of the two wills (dyothelitism) teaches something profound about both Christ and human nature:
Human freedom is not the enemy of divine will. It is its partner.
Christ's human will is not abolished by his divinity — it is perfected. And this is the pattern for every human soul: not the destruction of will, but its healing; not the replacement of human choosing with divine control, but the restoration of human choosing to its original harmony with God.
This is what synergeia — the cooperation of grace and will — looks like in its fullest expression: two wills, divine and human, united in a single act of love.
Dyothelitism teaches that Christ possesses two wills — divine and human — operating in perfect harmony, because a human nature without a genuine human will could not redeem the human capacity for choice.